On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 11:33:46PM -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jeremy D. Zawodny
> > Subject: Re: Which webmail do you prefer? Why?
> >
> >
> > Why does the implementation language matter?
>
> Although not a very technical example, you can't ignore this:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=Perl+exploits (about 45,400 hits)
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=PHP+exploits (about 128,000 hits)
ahh, but http://www.google.com/search?q=mygol+exploits (1 hit)
So use mygol instead! This mostly just shows the popularity of the language,
which is a good thing.
To be slightly more scientific about it, you need to divide the total
<lang>+exploits hits by the <lang> hits. This gives;
Perl : 40,000 / 13,500,000 = 0.29 %
PHP : 129,000 / 183,000,000 = 0.07%
Python : 12,300 / 5,080,000 = 0.24%
These figures probably show more about how bad this method of assessing
something is than anything else. There are so many factors that could bias
these results, they are hardly worth looking at.
The Python hits at first glance seem to be badly biased by the "Exploits of
Monty Python" all over the web (2,840 sub-hits on "Monty", which brings it
down to 0.18%).
The PHP and Perl results are probably slightly more indicative, and show PHP
as significantly less "exploited" than Perl. It also shows PHP as
significantly more popular than Perl.
--
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Donovan Baarda http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/
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